Two Marketo Records in Separate Partitions Connected to One Salesforce Contact Record

[alexdarwish]

Hello - We are trying to accommodate two separate business units/sales cycles in one shared Marketo instance as well as one shared Salesforce instance. The solution we're discussing is:

1. Create two partitions in Marketo & allow for duplicate records between them (e.g. person fills out form on website 1 and website 2)

2. Allow for duplicate Lead records to be created in Salesforce

3. When Lead #1 is qualified, convert to a new Contact record

4. When Lead #2 is qualified, convert it to that existing Contact record 

Will the SFIDs update so that both records in Marketo have the same shared Contact record SF ID? Can one Salesforce Contact record be connected/synced to two Marketo records? 

I recognize that duplicates are generally not the best approach but we have some firewall requirements that prevent each business unit from seeing certain data.

Any guidance is welcome - thanks!

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Salesforce just sees Marketo's lead database as one whole unit, and partitions within it are invisible to it. Having said that, I don't think with the native sync you can have a many-to-1 relationship with records in Marketo and SFDC, it's rather a 1:1 kind of relationship! Also, even though this was a possibility with all the data added to a single record in SFDC, on syncing with the respective records in Marketo, the data would likely be conflicting, and you'll also risk sharing the data across the BUs, which as you said you don't want in the first place. 

You can create 2 partitions, map each with its own workspace, and grant access to users based on the WS they're supposed to work in. This will ensure users can only see and access the people they're cleared to see. A custom de-duplication rule (Email + BU or Person Partition) would allow you to create records with the Email Address as distinct person records in Marketo. You'd need support's help to alter your default de-duplication rule which is based on just the Email Address field. These Marketo records will be kept in sync with distinct records in Salesforce (of course after you implicitly or explicitly sync people from Marketo). IMHO, this is a lot more predictable and cleaner approach than thinking about mapping multiple Marketo records with a single record in Salesforce.